Life has been oddly low key at the Rodriguez household. For such a long time we have been operating at such a frenzied pace that I must admit this dramatic down shift has been a little hard to get use to. Not that it is bad or anything it just feels different. Normally by this time we would have done 2 more cycles of chemo and by next week heading back to Houston. While it's certainly nice to not have to do those things it's just been an adjustment on our part.
Joel has been doing really well. I think he has been a little frustrated at how long it has taken him to "get back to normal" so to speak-and he is still not there. His muscles were so used to inactivity that now the smallest bit of activity renders him pretty sore and tired. Our doctor told him to expect it to take Joel an entire year for him to feel like he did pre-cancer. At first we thought "a year...there's no way!" but it's already been a month and a half since his last treatment and we both thought he would have made more progress than he has. That's ok though. He still has about 1 more month until he goes back to work and he plans to spend most of it resting up and getting ready to enter the work-force again. He will need every bit of that time.

This coming Sunday we celebrate Joel's 34th birthday! A year ago I had no idea if he would see 34. When Joel was diagnosed I didn't even want to know what stage Joel's cancer was-I could tell by the scans it was bad-I didn't need to know exactly how bad. I now know that it was stage III. The only thing keeping it from stage IV for is that by the grace of God it hadn't spread out of his kidney. But based on the sheer size alone it should've been a stage IV. Stage IV is as bad as it gets-there is no stage V. When I look back a year ago and to see where we are now, celebrating Joel and another year of his life, well God's faithfulness and grace is all just all pretty amazing. We sang a song at church yesterday by Brian Johnson from Bethel that really encapsulates how I feel.

Sarah Rodriguez Rhodes

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Ellis Update: Today was a hard morning, guys. We got to the hospital & things just felt all wrong. I don’t know how to explain it other than that. Then the anesthesiologist had issues with some secretions Ellis was having that we were told amplified her risk during the surgery while under anesthesia. Given the past things we’ve walked through, we just decided it wasn’t a risk we were at all willing to take. So we made the decision to go home, re-group & do the surgery another day. Since the surgery is elective we had our medical teams full support in this decision. We are home now & doing well. This wasn’t an easy decision to make. For months we’ve prepared mentally, emotionally, schedule-wise, financially etc for this day. But we have to be lead by peace. And if those giving her medical care also weren’t completely at peace, it just wasn’t the right time, for whatever reason. I don’t always understand the “why” but I won’t always & I’m ok with that. We appreciate your prayers & promise to keep you informed of when her surgery will be in the coming months. Also, the day wasn’t a complete loss...Ellis did get to hang with the cute hospital dog-so at least that part was a win ☺️ Looking for some kind of humor-it’s been a rough day.

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